In Ukraine’s military academies, the doctrines of Georgy Zhukov, the celebrated Soviet general whose victory at Stalingrad turned the tide of World War II, are still taught.
But the soldiers learn about him as an example of what not to do. Given that in the focus of the current war in Europe, the Battle of Bakhmut has been described as Ukraine’s Stalingrad, this is a gamble of which academy recruits are all too aware.
“We’re taught in many ways not to fight,” Second Lieutenant Roman, a bare-faced 23-year-old newly appointed to the Ukrainian army’s 80th brigade, told The Times. “We’re not taught that much ways we should do it.”
A hundred meters away, a 40-year-old howitzer is shelling an ammunition depot behind Russian lines.
In Bakhmut, Ukrainian infantry took up positions in the city’s rows of Soviet-era apartment blocks, retreating only when Russian artillery destroyed them. To an outsider, the result looks a lot like Stalingrad, albeit on a smaller scale.
Roman’s commanding officer showed a video on his phone of the results of one of his squad’s artillery barrages: the white dots dotting the muddy field captured by a drone were Russian bodies marking a patch of no-man’s land. Ukrainians are also dying by the thousands.
The human wave tactic pioneered by Zhukov – sending men to make suicidal attacks on German buildings, with a second squad of men behind to shoot anyone who turns and runs away – is still used by Russia today, especially by the Wagner mercenaries. who led the attack on Bakhmut. “These people are cannon fodder, just like Zhukov’s people,” says Roman. “They do the same thing now as he did then.”
The battle for Stalingrad lasted 200 days. The battle for Bakhmut, who is much smaller, lasted longer. The Russians first attacked in May, but did not really turn their attention to the city until they captured the larger prize of Severodonetsk, 40 miles to the north, in July.
While Roman’s more advanced battlefield training could come in handy when Ukraine launches its planned counteroffensive in the next month or so, with an emphasis on the surgical use of Western-supplied heavy tanks, for now the war still appears to be on on old school models. That must change, Ukraine’s Western advisers said, or the men and ammunition will run out.
Bakhmut controls an important highway to the last two major Donbas cities still in Ukrainian hands, Kramatorsk and Slavyansk. But Bakhmut’s strategic value is far greater than its symbolic value for both sides. Battles are easier to start than to finish.
If all the numerical superiority of Russia cannot prevail in a town of 70,000, what hope does she have of neutralizing the whole of Ukraine, a giant compared to any European country but Russia itself?
But if the Ukraine cannot hold it, after pouring men into its defense for eight months, including its most hardened officers, how can it hope to break through the Russian defenses to the sea in a counter-attack and liberate the territory, which lost in Russia invasion last year? The standard calculation is that the attacking force takes three or more times as many casualties as the defending force, and this is true for both the Ukrainians and the Russians.
For soldiers who have been at the front longer than Roman, the mental toll of the tactics employed by both sides is clear. Slavik, a wiry veteran of the 21st Brigade, looks raw, bloodshot eyes and a red face as he returns from the front line on the city’s southern outskirts. His fingers tremble as he lights a cigarette while waiting for his vehicle to be repaired.
The city’s flanks needed to be reinforced with experienced units like his. He says that when a territorial defense battalion – reserves and volunteers – was put on the line, they lost their position within two days.
“There’s a lot of direct contact,” he explains. “There is building upon building in the city.” He claimed the killing ratio of the two countries was seven to one in Ukraine’s favor and agreed with British military intelligence suggestions that Russia was slowing down and possibly running out of ammunition. “The intensity is less,” he adds.
General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, went further, saying that Bakhmut was a “slaughter” for the Russians. “They get hit,” he said.
But the men of the 80th Brigade and other soldiers from the front contested this. “If anything, their fire is more intense now,” said Max, who was in Chasov Yar, the village at the mouth of Ukraine’s Bakhmut Pocket.
The Russians have doubled their men in the town itself, making a road across the river which crosses it and reaches near the town square. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the businessman who runs the Wagner Group, posted a video of himself raising a flag at what he claimed was Bakhmut’s town hall.
Western observers fear that Ukraine has lost some of its best officers defending Bakhmut. While Russia sacrificed between 20-30,000 men, many, if not most, were the released “Wagner” prisoners.
Lieutenant Vyacheslav, the commander of the howitzer squad, insists that tiring out the enemy and preventing them from moving towards the villages west of Bakhmut is a good tactic as well as a public relations decision.
“If we withdraw from Bakhmut, it will be very difficult to get it back,” he says. “Meanwhile, our tactics are wearing the Russians down.”
Or as Roman puts it: “Why advance when you can keep killing Russians when defending yourself?”
“If it is necessary or possible to advance, as in the Kharkov offensive last year, then of course we will. But otherwise we can just wait for them to come and be killed.
Zhukov’s troops were Soviet and included hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers as well as Russians.
If Bakhmut can hold out, it will be a rallying point of huge emotional value for both the people of Ukraine and its international supporters.
There is a general assumption among Western military advisers to Ukraine that few armies can defeat Moscow in a war of attrition. Bakhmut is the latest test of this theory.
